meet-(not-so)-cute
by hiyoris-scarf
Summary: Ed's never seen anyone chug so much caffeine so quickly, and frankly it scares him. (T rating for language)


For the Edwin Week 2016 prompt, "modern day," and inspired by that one great tumblr post. Cross-posted on tumblr and AO3.

* * *

All things considered, Ed Elric's first couple weeks at UOC were pretty uneventful. However, "uneventful" would not accurately describe this particular morning.

He typically struggled to stay awake during his 7 a.m. biology class, but today Ed found himself watching, open-mouthed, as the girl who usually sat next to him walked to her seat. She was carrying a huge cup, about a quarter full of tar-like espresso, and in her other hand she held a can of Monster. The expression on her face was a mixture of sheer desperation and steely resolve.

Ed had been half-asleep himself, but he sprang wide awake as he watched her stride purposefully to her seat. She plunked the coffee down next to his elbow, popped the tab of the Monster, and emptied its entire contents into the espresso.

"Um," Ed half-objected, watching as she raised the evil-looking brew to her lips.

The girl paused, stared him dead on, and pronounced:

"I'm going to die."

Ed's jaw flapped open as she drank the entire contents of the cup in record time. When she was about three gulps in, the hand holding the cup to her mouth started to shake visibly.

"Um." He said it louder this time. "Are you—do you think that's smart?"

She raised a finger to him in response: _not done yet_ , it said. Seconds later, she tore her mouth from the lip of the cup, slammed the empty container down on the surface of the lab table, and pressed both heels of her hands into her temples.

"I can _see molecules_ ," she intoned, and Ed snatched the empty Monster can to check the ingredient list. Were energy drinks supposed to trigger hallucinogenic experiences?

"I'm kidding," she said, putting her hands back on the table and grinning at him.

She looked disorientingly lucid, despite the caffeine that must be pouring through her system. Feeling foolish, Ed flushed and set the can back down.

"Oh."

As she pulled out her chair, the girl said:

"It's nice to meet you, by the way. I've always been ninety-percent unconscious in this class. But now that that's taken care of—my name's Winry Rockbell."

She stuck her right hand down and out toward him, and Ed shook it quickly. He immediately noticed that her hands were very warm, and one of his fingers brushed a small callous on the ridge of her thumb.

"I'm Ed."

He finally realized how much he was staring, and looked away as she sat down.

"Well, Ed, did your enrollment counselor have a personal grudge against you too?"

"Huh?"

Winry rolled her eyes.

"It's 7 a.m. and we're about to rehash the Krebs Cycle. Don't tell me you signed up for this bio section _voluntarily_."

Ed couldn't stop looking at the completely empty cup, and back to the girl he'd sat next to for two weeks without ever speaking to. She'd always worn a hoodie pulled all the way up and cinched close around her face, so he'd never really seen her before. Her yellow ponytail spilled over a shoulder, and through it he saw the glint of multiple stud earrings. Finally, he said:

"This was the only bio section I could take, since I'm overloading on credits this quarter. It does suck, though."

"Right? Especially 'cause of _this_ guy."

Winry wrinkled her nose and jerked a thumb toward the professor, who had just entered the room rolling a rattling cart with an ancient projector balanced on it. He was a slight man with small glasses pushed low on his nose, and a head of colorless hair. Something about the way Professor Tucker's fingers moved, always adjusting his necktie or fidgeting with a button, made Ed vaguely uncomfortable.

"He looks like the kind of guy who'd have us put a hamster in a microwave for some sort of sick experiment," he said, wryly.

The morbid joke earned a snort and a smile from Winry. Ed suddenly felt like every nerve in his body had become hyperaware.

"Yeah, he did seem a bit too happy when he announced we'd get into some dissections this week," she agreed.

Ed chuckled, and managed to keep looking at her out of the corner of his eye as she got out her notebook. A few minutes ticked by as Professor Tucker fought with the prehistoric projector at the front of the classroom.

Despite the fact that Winry had, according to her own confession, been less than half-awake during this class, Ed saw that her notes for all the others were meticulous: pages covered in fine, straight-edged script that Ed envied. He looked down at his own tipsy handwriting and felt the urge to hide it under his arm. Then, Winry flipped past all her notes and opened to a page covered in diagrams that looked disconcertingly like—

"Is that a leg?!" Ed asked before he could stop himself, completely awestruck.

A spot of red appeared on Winry's visible cheekbone, and he wondered if he'd said something wrong.

"Um…yeah. I'm kind of obsessed with prosthetics. As you can guess, I was _super_ popular in high school."

Ed stared at the detailed mechanisms of the leg she had diagrammed, and he was more than just impressed. Winry's sketches weren't just intricate—they were downright beautiful. Even though he had no idea what three-fourths of her annotations meant, he found himself leaning in closer to see how the thing would work. Obviously her goal was to create a tool that would look as fluid and function as organically as a flesh limb.

"Hey, don't go stealing my ideas," she said playfully, bumping his shoulder with a fist. Ed realized that he was basically leaning across her lap, and heat flooded his face for the second time that morning. He shot back into his seat, and resorted to facetiousness to cover his embarrassment.

"I think I'd have to chug a Red Bull and coffee to even understand this stuff. Is that your big secret?"

Winry flipped to a blank page and turned her nose up at him in mock disgust.

"How dare you insinuate such a thing? My secret is _genius_."

Ed was about to retort, but Professor Tucker now stood at the head of the lecture hall. He cleared his throat, the dry, chalky sound echoing throughout the mostly silent room. Tucker snapped the projector on, and looked at the back of the room where Ed and Winry sat.

"Turn the lights off please, would you?" he asked, gesturing vaguely toward Ed. Ed slid out of his seat and flicked the switch that dimmed the room. The parchment-colored light of the projector wavered as Tucker began to launch into a monotonous and criminally boring lecture. Ed glanced across the row at the other students, and saw that most of them had chosen to catch up on sleep. One kid—a guy with a long black ponytail—had even brought a damn pillow. Then, Ed ventured another look at Winry, and saw that she was working on a new diagram. Even in the dimness, the lines of an arm were taking quick shape under her pencil.

Ed watched her work in silence for the next ten minutes; even though Tucker was discussing a topic that Ed would have found quite interesting otherwise, the drone of his voice made it impossible for him to pick out individual words.

"Wow, this class really _is_ boring," Winry muttered. Ed was about to remark that she ought to know that by now, but then remembered that according to her own admission, she had been unconscious for most of them. So he quipped:

"What are you talking about? This is the highlight of my day."

Winry snorted again, loudly, and Tucker paused his lecture long enough to squint in disapproval at the back of the room.

"I feel like I've been missing out by sleeping through class all the time," she whispered, after Tucker returned to his topic without having missed a beat. Ed blushed, again—what was with him today?—and found that he had nothing to say. The fact that they had to whisper in the back of the room was also putting a damper on his conversational skills. If only Tucker would shut up, then Ed could compliment her diagrams properly, and, just maybe, he wouldn't keep turning red like a prepubescent idiot.

"You look like you're about to throw up. Were my gastronomic theatrics too much for you?" Winry asked, interrupting his thoughts.

Ed looked back at her, and even in the dim light of the projector, he saw that her smile was genuine. Ed realized, to his intense alarm, that Winry was too sweet, too talented, and too pretty to go many more weeks without someone else saying the words he was too scared to.

"Hey," he began, lamely. She nodded in encouragement.

"Hey…you're, uhh. You're…gonna need to eat something after all that caffeine."

He nearly put his head right down on the table. Ed Elric, the champion of chivalry, he thought. Smoothest motherfucker at the University of Central sitting right here, no doubt about it.

Luckily for him, Winry Rockbell was much more astute and articulate than he could hope to be.

"I was planning on undoing some of the damage after class with a proper meal. Would you like to join me? I promise to show you enough sketches of prosthetic limbs to probably ruin your appetite."

Ed's nonchalant reply couldn't hide his enormous relief:

"Yeah, that would be…great, actually."

Winry smiled again, and even though Ed wasn't the one who had chugged an illegal dose of stimulants, his pulse tripped noticeably. Then, she suddenly grimaced.

"Just—no coffee. Please."

The rest of Tucker's class turned around to stare at Ed as he choked on his own laughter.


End file.
